Precocious Page 6

  He was playing fair; I started at the firm two days earlier (only because, as she repeatedly pointed out, Karen had had a holiday in Marbella which she couldn’t possibly cancel) so I could choose first.

  ‘Or we could draw straws,’ he was saying.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I’ll take the black one,’ I said. Karen looked as though she would hug me, if it didn’t entail the risk of smudging her make-up. She took the keys triumphantly, like a prize.

  But all I could see was a car in a row with a dozen others. I wasn’t being ungrateful; it was clean, and functional. But it wouldn’t feel like mine.

  I love those corny magazine articles: ‘What does your car say about you?’ Mine says I’m a cog in a machine.

  I always look enviously at people in old bangers that they’ve lovingly brought back to life. I love seeing things hanging from rear-view mirrors, even though Dave thinks it’s ‘tacky’. I notice these things. Air fresheners, often; fluffy dice (which is probably what Karen has in her silver Mondeo, now); once, a rosary. Once a photograph. People just want to personalise their space, I tell Dave. I love that.

  I turn off the radio, light a cigarette, hang my arm out of the window. I look at the ‘No Smoking’ sticker on the dashboard; all pool cars have them. It gives the impression of being in a taxi: being in transitory, borrowed space, governed by someone else’s rules. Dog walkers pass by. A man helps a much older woman (his mother? Grandmother, even?) down the steps of the church opposite. A lilac tree overhanging the pavement sends a rush of scent into my car; I feel decadent, polluting it with nicotine. I eye passersby boldly, as though anticipating a challenge, but none of them look at me. There is nothing extraordinary, to them, about a thirty-year-old woman pulled over on a suburban street, smoking.

  You answer the door with a glass in your hand and a tea towel thrown over your shoulder. You’re wearing shorts and a linen shirt.

  ‘His name was Peter,’ I say. ‘The one who broke my heart. Or nearly did. If you must know.’

  You raise an eyebrow.

  ‘You didn’t say you were coming. I might not be alone.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I brush by you, holding out the cigarettes like a backstage pass. You laugh and I feel heat from your smile.

  Lying on your sofa, leaning into you, your hands resting on my shoulders, I tell the story.

  Peter was what they call a ladies’ man. Or a man’s man – they amount to the same thing. He was smooth. The first thing I said to him was, ‘If you ever call me a lady again, I’ll give you a black eye.’

  He came from a different world to the one I knew. At the weekends he would go sailing, or to watch polo matches. His friends all had the straight teeth and shiny hair of the wealthy. Not many of them worked, but he did, and that was how we met. He was destined for success, even though he used to wind up our boss by calling her ‘babe’ all the time.

  He stood out. People wanted to be near him – he was magnetic. This is a definite advantage when you work in sales.

  On a team night out, tired of the trail of low-lit, overpriced bars where everyone watched everyone else and no one seemed to ever smile, I sneaked him off to a place I knew with dirty carpets and music so loud it hammered in your chest like a heartbeat. He loved it, and in a taxi kissed me for seven whole miles while the blinking red light ticked over the cost.

  It was a classic and predictable trap. He was a rogue and I thought I could change him. It all happened faster than it should have. We lived together and, for a while, it was intense and fun and curious.

  ‘Isn’t Peter supposed to mean rock?’ I asked him once.

  He laughed.

  ‘I’m the opposite,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t try to hold onto me. I’m more like,’ trailing his hand over the side of the boat, ‘water.’

  Or air, I thought. Always there, surrounding me, but impossible to fix myself to.

  Then what happened? What everyone said would happen: he got bored, I got jealous. Before long, he was kissing other girls in taxis.

  ‘I was never enough for him,’ I tell you now, ‘nor him for me.’

  I couldn’t give him enough attention – no one person ever could – and he couldn’t give me enough security. We both came out of it a little worse off, but I don’t tell you that part, because I want you to believe I am wiser, better, now.

  ‘Where is he now?’ you murmur. Your breath in my hair.

  ‘Married. She isn’t enough for him either.’

  ‘Oh? How do you know?’

  I twist around from the waist, look into your eyes.

  ‘How do I know? How do you think?’

  ‘Ah,’ you say slowly, ‘I see. Revenge. When was this?’

  ‘A while ago. After we split up, but before I met Dave. It was only … it only happened once.’ This part a lie; it was a messy affair that went on for weeks.

  ‘And did it make you feel better? Or not?’

  ‘It did,’ I shrug, ‘for about five minutes. I mean, at least I knew it wasn’t me … I wasn’t the only one he cheated on. It wasn’t anything I did wrong. I certainly didn’t feel bad about it.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Your hands squeeze, hard, too close to my throat. Another inch and I would be choking. I hold my breath. ‘I wish I did, though,’ you say, your voice like metal.

  The reality of your touch hits me like cold air after a fire.

  I jump up, smooth out imaginary wrinkles from my clothes.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Okay.’

  You don’t care if I leave or stay. I can be there, or not. I could disappear for another fifteen years. It wouldn’t upset you, or please you; it would be irrelevant. I am dizzy, overwhelmed by a need to affect you.

  What is the best way? With stories, and words? With indifference? (But this was always your forte, not mine.) I lean forward and kiss you, uninvited. I want to stake my claim, leave a print on you.

  Your lips are still, and soft. You taste of smoke. I touch your hair, run a fingernail down the back of your neck. You don’t move, and pulling away wordlessly, the threat of tears stinging my throat, I leave but know I’ll be back.

  I’m not surprised to find the drive home gets to me. Cars can be lonely places. I try to distract myself from where I’ve been, and from where I’m going.

  I follow a young guy in a blue Clio for a while. Funny, I always thought a Clio was more of a girl’s car. Those ‘Nicole’ adverts. Still. Perhaps he thinks the same, because he has tried to beef it up a bit, with big tyres and something resembling an egg-box stuck to the back.

  People flip their lights on. Some as soon as the cloud starts to drop, cautious souls, not to be confused with the Volvo drivers whose sidelights are on permanently due to the car’s country of origin, country of no light. Some take much longer, maybe enjoying the gamble, having little bored bets with themselves, how near to home can they get before they have to switch on, every day they get a bit nearer, that means spring is coming. Maybe some are enjoying that fast, anonymous feeling of driving in the dark, like flying.

  Metal boxes buzzing up and down tarmac, everyone in their little worlds. That slice of time you don’t have to account for, In The Car. People driving home from Sunday lunches with families. People talking on mobiles, reps like me in Mondeos and Vectras with handsfree, heartsfree. The Wife thinks you get up, go to work, come home, but when you’re In The Car, she doesn’t know where you are.

  No one knows where I am.

  But although a car covers you, it can also betray you.

  I watch the trip counter wheels click forward, forward, forward, with the unsettling feeling that I’m being clocked.

  This is how life works. You go to work, you get married. You pay the bills, do the shopping. It’s an endless cycle. Maybe you have babies. Some people do. But not me, not us.

  I stand at the checkout, listenin
g to the ‘beep, beep’, in a daze. This is my life, I think. I’m on the conveyor belt. But so is everyone else, says a smaller voice, and what’s so bad about it?

  And in these endless arguments with myself, as I pack the bags and hand over my card, punch in my number, the overriding question is always:

  What if I just jumped off?

  There are secret ways I can have you near me when we are apart. I start taking your sugar in my tea. Run my shower colder because I know that is how you like it. Play music I have heard in your car, in your house. Drink your drink – rum and coke. Stop wearing a seatbelt.

  You are everywhere.

  HM. Your initials. I see them in car registrations and my heart skips a beat. I seek out the letters H and M in newspapers and draw them together with my eyes.

  HM.

  Him. Him, him, him. You, you, you. Parasite of my thoughts.

  Hmm. A thought; a consideration.

  Hum. Music. A throb, a buzzing, a beat.

  Humbert. Humbug.

  I take every opportunity to be alone – taking a bath, popping out to the shops – just so that I can have my thoughts of you without any interruption. So that if a faraway look passes across my face, I don’t have to explain it, won’t have to lie to that most intrusive of questions: ‘What are you thinking?’

  Dave and I aren’t used to arguing; haven’t done it for years. It’s a foreign country to us; we can’t speak its language. We fumble for words and end up spewing out half-syllables and slamming exasperated doors.

  When he asked me to marry him I cried and cried. He did everything you’re supposed to. He’d done it before, after all. Location: smart French restaurant. Candles … even a violinist! Champagne. Ring: solitaire, naturally. Just as I’d wanted. He always seemed to know what I would like. Never asked, though. Down on one knee. Expectant, hopeful eyes. The little tell-tale box. Subdued rounds of applause from the other diners. Streams and streams of tears and the promise he would always look after me. Then the ring was on my hand and hasn’t moved since, except to make way for its partner, the gold band.

  Thinking about it – I never actually said yes.

  This has been the anatomy of our marriage: he has made decisions, I’ve gone along with them. So it comes as a surprise to both of us that there is fight in us.

  It seems those who love the hardest fight the hardest. And not just for each other but against.

  And that ability we have to finish each other’s sentences – I use that as a hammer. Kill every word I don’t want to listen to, snuff it out. It goes like this:

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Why do you always interrupt me?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  (I had been surprised to find out only a few days before the wedding, at the rehearsal, that during the ceremony you don’t actually say ‘I Do’. You say ‘I Will’. Makes sense, really. It has a greater air of permanence. ‘I Do’ sounds like ‘I do at the moment, yeah’, or ‘Well alright then – for now’. ‘I Will’ has another word hiding in there somewhere: it has ‘always’ under its breath.)

  Fights don’t fit patterns. Do they?

  We try to contain them in rounds. We put them in a ring, which is actually a square, with a bell and a referee and a barely dressed girl flashing up numbered cards.

  When we were first married, Dave had a failsafe way of deflecting arguments just as they were about to begin. He could see me coming. He would distract me into laughing, by shouting, ‘Ding a ling a ling: Round One!’

  But now there is no laughter. Looking around our home all I can see are things. Washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge freezer, dishwasher. I’m surrounded. I’m a housewife in a 1950s TV commercial. I feel applianced in. Everything has been bought together or bought by parents-in-law, sitting looking at me whitely, quietly, waiting to be divided, fought over, split. All the work we did on this place, the paint colours, the sanded floors, the carefully chosen mirrors and vases and blinds, they’re reminders I don’t want, can’t look at.

  I’m starting to fill with an irrational hatred. He’s the block, the barrier to me living the life I was supposed to have. I curse the vanity and greed that led me down that stupid aisle. Dazzled by diamonds and the promise of nothing more than the same kind of life as everyone else has. Why had I gone along with it? How could I not have known that this day would come, when I would be bored and he would be frustrated, and in you would swagger to rouse me from my anaesthesia?

  I hate Dave.

  You start off seeing everything that’s there in a person, wanting to see and know everything. Next you see the faults, the pieces that don’t quite fit. Then you start looking for what’s not there.

  I found a You-shaped gap, unfillable.

  ‘I always feel there’s a little bit of you that’s unknowable,’ Dave said once, in a matter-of-fact way that made it seem like this didn’t trouble him.

  I shook my head at it but he was right. The only bit of me he couldn’t have was the bit where you still lived. You carved a nook inside me that no one could see.

  Language is unpeeling from me. How is it that these lips, this tongue, all the apparatus of kissing, that once formed the words ‘You are my angel’, now struggle to generate anything but lies?

  Each lie is smooth and round, like a marble in my mouth. And it isn’t just the words: my clothes are a lie. The laptop case I bring through the door and set down with a sigh, implying I have been working late. The mints I eat to mask the smell of the cigarettes he wouldn’t approve of. The baths I know I will take to wash you off me, when the inevitable happens, as it must.

  I’m planning for it. I find myself in a department store, under unforgiving lights, buying lingerie for a man I’ve barely kissed (this time around, anyway). Adultery underwear, I think to myself, laughing in a giddy, guilty way, swinging the bag on the way back to the car, sneaking its contents into a separate drawer, away from my usual things (white and black only; cotton, mostly; utilitarian), as if to prevent cross-contamination. I touch the new satin and lace reverently, bury the violent jewel-colours – ruby, emerald, amethyst – under innocuous towels and sheets. For now.

  I’m preparing for something that is coming towards me, unstoppable as a train. Separate drawers, separate lives; these are the necessary precautions and I perform them with the cool precision of a surgeon. I’m almost certain Dave won’t find out, and if he does, my only defence will be, pathetic as a shrug: ‘I couldn’t stop it.’

  Lies, arguments, silence, secrets. This is the new anatomy of our marriage.

  six

  Diary: Wednesday, 11 November 1992

  I phoned HM, he’d just got out of the shower (there’s an image), we talked for a bit. He said he’s got a letter for me, he’s had it for a week and kept forgetting to give it to me! I remember now seeing him at the play rehearsals the other day and he dropped an envelope, then shoved it back into his jeans pocket. I had a feeling it might be for me. He says he’ll give it to me on Saturday – nudge nudge, wink wink, etc.

  When I think about it, I have really sort of worked on him, and I feel like I’m getting somewhere. In the space of about a year, I’ve decided I would get close to him and I have. I wonder if this will always work for me? I know I’m not exactly good looking, so it’s not like I attract loads of boys, but I think I have a good mind and once I set it on someone, I get them.

  I have got a tiny piece of HM – but it gives me hope. I will get all of him some day.

  No one at home questioned why I was going to Mr Morgan’s house on a Saturday, although I didn’t give them the opportunity to. I only told Alex, who muttered, ‘he’s a pervert’, but then, he said that about everyone. ‘Pervert’ was his new favourite word. He even shouted it at Dad once, who just blinked at him as though he didn’t know what it meant.

  I was up early, twisting my damp hair into knots to make it curl, humm
ing, slathering cocoa butter onto my skin until the smell made me feel dizzy. Mum was busy ‘cleaning’. Contrary to initial appearances, she wasn’t very domestic. She made a martyred show of housework but was terrible at it. She would spray polish without dusting first, leaving sweet-smelling balls of hair and mites mummified on the furniture. She vacuumed only the centre of rooms, so that the edges turned grey while a central circle of carpet buzzed with colour.

  The soundtrack to what she called cleaning was always The Musicals. She loved them all. You could tell what mood she was in by which record she was playing: today was Phantom of the Opera so was obviously going to be dramatic. Her quivering voice fought with the vacuum cleaner.

  As I edged towards the window she saw me, narrowed her eyes and shouted, ‘Why are you wearing so much makeup so early in the day?’

  ‘I’m going out,’ I yelled over Michael Crawford. I stood at the window watching for your car, and immediately its blue-green nose rounded the corner I was down the path.

  ‘See you later,’ I called, my bag swinging behind me.

  Even though I hoped I would be staying all day, I ran my eye greedily over every detail of your bungalow: a square, welcoming hall and five closed doors. You opened one of them, to the right, and motioned for me to enter the lounge. Its terracotta walls looked freshly painted. A sofa and matching chaise-longue showed no signs of wear. I looked down. A bold, diamond-patterned rug was positioned in perfect alignment against the polished dark wood floorboards. Even your scatter cushions were organised. Reluctant to sit down for fear of creasing something, I retreated and found you in the kitchen (spotless). I watched you from the doorway and laughed when you filled the kettle from a little jug rather than just yanking it from the wall as we did at home.